The 4 Mistakes We All Make In Love

When it comes to love, we don’t get a licence to certify that we’re properly qualified. We fall in love, like we might a pothole we could have avoided had we been paying closer attention. Relationships come without guidebooks or user manuals. So it’s no surprise we:

1. Mistake romance for love

Romance is love’s PR campaign. It’s untrustworthy and airbrushed. Romance lasts 6 -18 months tops. Only after our illusions that the person we’ve fallen in love with is perfect, will love us perfectly and make us happy shatter, does a relationship grow up and get real. A relationship that’s grown out of romance isn’t over. It’s just begun.

2. Believe the Fairytales… Seriously?

Remember that Snow White’s prince fell in love with her as she lay pale and lifeless in a coffin. Fairytales are shocking models for our love maps. But they’re fed to us from such an early age, causing us to bloat with unrealistic expectations and a sense of entitlement that we’re too special to ‘settle,’ and love, like home delivery must come to us. The cultural hype around romance has set the bar so high that nothing short of heart-screeching attraction to someone is good enough. We want designer relationships. Soulmates. Royal weddings. Ordinary decent good-enough love is not the booby prize. It’s the real thing.

3. Default into, ‘Why do you have to be such an asshole?‘

When things go wrong, of course it’s our partners’ fault. But even if one person is acting out (having an affair, gambling etc) any problem exposes the underlying dynamics between two people. Blame, like every cigarette, is hurting, not helping our relationship and is a responsibility-avoidance tactic, keeping us the victim. And who wants to wear that outfit and stay that disempowered? Our job is to work out what part we’re playing in the dynamic: are we enabling our partners to be an asshole? Are our boundaries firm enough? Do we hold onto affection, compassion and kindness through difficult times? When it comes to love, being right doesn’t make us winners. Divorce courts are filled with people who were ‘right.’

4. Avoid looking back

When we were little, we unconsciously absorbed the strongest messages about love in our families of origin which in turn, laid the tracks for our future adult relationships. The less we know about how our parents’ relationships shaped us, the harder it will be for us to understand what goes wrong in our adult relationships. For example, if my mother was emotionally cold and my father was passive but loving, I probably won’t be attracted to ‘nice guys,’ and will unintentionally be looking for love from someone who resembles the person I couldn’t get love from as a child (my mother). This is why some of us end up falling for people who are unavailable. Unconsciously we ‘re-enact’ aspects of our childhood in the hope of creating a better outcome. Inner work helps us to see what we’re doing so we can unhinge ourselves from our patterns which run deep in the psyche. We can look at ourselves and think, ’There I go again, making a fuss about mess, because as a kid, I had to cope with the messiness of my father’s emotional outbursts.’ With insight, we can become kinder to ourselves. We may even laugh at ourselves. We can only change if we know what needs to change.

In love, when in doubt we can: look within, take responsibility and forgive (ourselves as well as our partners). Mistakes are only problems if we don’t learn from them.    

This extract is taken from Joanne Fedler's book It Doesn't Have to Be So Hard which you can buy here

Joanne Fedler is the author of the international bestseller, Secret Mothers' Business, and other titles including When Hungry, Eat and The Reunion. She is a former law lecturer and women's rights activist. She teaches life and creative writing and takes women on writing adventures in exotic destinations. (www.joannefedler.com)      

What are the mistakes that you made in your relationships?